Quality-By-Design in Spray Drying Processes - Transfer Lab to Production

Spray drying is a continuous and scalable manufacturing process commonly used in the pharmaceutical industry. Due to its scalable and continuous nature it is possible to apply Quality-by-Design (QbD) and Process Analytical Technologies (PAT) early on in the development of a spray drying process.
Knowledge gained from QbD e.g. Design-of-Experiments (DoE) and PAT increases process understanding and the knowledge can be readily applied when scaling up the process and in production scale application of PAT i.e. especially with respect to the control strategy.
The Webinar will discuss the application of QbD early in the development and how the obtained knowledge can be used to optimize transfer of the spray drying process to production scale including PAT strategy.

The utilization of Multivariate Data Analysis (MVDA) techniques at Sanofi Pasteur, Toronto site has demonstrated innovative capabilities for improved process understanding, control and diagnostics. Examples from several successful and high impact applications will be presented. These examples cover the application of MVDA techniques in multivariate process control, root cause investigations and process analytical technology (PAT). The areas of application include fermentation, downstream purification and product formulation stages.

Large scale Production of Biologics is susceptible to microbial contamination because many manufacturing steps occur under non-sterile conditions in aqueous systems at ambient temperature or 2-8 °C under substantially neutral pH conditions. Regardless of where in the Drug Substance (DS) manufacture (manufacture of the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient), or Drug Product (DP) manufacture (manufacture of the Final Drug, e.g. formulated mAbs filled in vials or syringes) they occur, microbial contaminations can have a significant impact on product quality and patient safety. Even after bioburden removal by 0.2 µm filtration subcellular microbial components like toxins, lipopeptide/lipoproteins, flagellin, bacterial and fungal DNA, cell wall polysaccharides, extracellular proteases or endoglycosidases remain in the product. Those microbial components potentially lead to toxic, allergic or inflammatory responses in humans or product degradation or modification. The CCAB approach described here enables a comprehensive assessment of these risks.

Today Pharmaceutical industry remains conservative for microbiology testing methods and has reluctance to develop and to use Alternative and Rapid Microbiological Methods (RMM) supported by a number of misunderstandings and prejudgments based on the following myths:
- RMM are not accepted by regulation authorities,
- RMM will never replace classical microbial methods,
- RMM will not offer return on investment (ROI),
- Data generated from RMMs will exceed current specifications and limits involving increase in batch rejections.

Nevertheless a movement is in progress for the use of new technologies and systems because classical microbial methods, in spite of their long return of experiences and their confidence for the regulatory point of view, have a number of disadvantages such as:

- Time to results in days to weeks,
- Results vary with microbial population, media, culture conditions,
- Lack of reactivity in case of exceeding limit results,
- Sensitivity could be insufficient giving underestimations in the contamination risk,
- Existence of confluent growth.

This webinar provides an overview of the current situation about RMM technologies, regulatory expectations, it proposes some initiatives facilitating the implementation of RMM including a strategy for validation and it gives a projection for the perspectives of the RMMs for the future.

We will introduce Chromassette® and an application example of an integrated rapid single pass process from harvest to purified bulk, a concept demonstrated by AbbVie. Chromassette is a stackable, single-use and pre-packed chromatography cassette with a supported bed, addressing the current key challenges in manufacturing. Chromassette enhances the separation capabilities of chromatography resins and combines it with the convenience of a modular cassette.

FROM EARLY STAGE TO LATE STAGE DEVELOPMENT: HOW TO CHARACTERIZE A PERFUSION-BASED VACCINE PRODUCTION PROCESS USING QBD?
The biopharmaceutical industry is known for its long time-to-market and for requiring large resources and time investment for product development. The type of activities required at the start of a biopharmaceutical product development focus mainly on designing a suitable process for manufacturing as rapidly as possible material to be tested in pre-clinical and clinical trials. This is followed, upon success in early clinical trials, by a process optimization phase, which aims at increasing yields while reducing costs-of-good. Moving on towards late stage development, the manufacturing process needs to be characterized, meaning that its robustness to produce the desired product quality when operated within certain process ranges needs to be demonstrated. This phase requires large numbers of development batches using elaborate analytical methods and advanced statistics, in order to fully study the relations between the manufacturing process and product quality.
Janssen Vaccines has transitioned over the last 3 years from early stage process development to full late stage development programs. In this presentation, we present the implications of such a transition, with the case-study of the QbD-based characterization of a perfusion-based PER.C6® cell culture process for Adenovirus vaccine production at Janssen Vaccines.

Title: Extractables and Leachables have been used interchangeablely for too long. Are we still confused?
Presenters: Ken Wong, Deputy Director at Sanofi Pasteur and Diego Zurbriggen, Technical Account Manager at West Pharma

Following patent cliffs for Erbitux, Rituxan, Sandosta_n and several big blockbusters, Herceptin, Avastin are now among the next biosimilar targets. This is creating huge potential for biosimilars, prompting innovators to shift their focus to target more emerging markets which remain untapped for many companies. In this presentation, Joe will be sharing with you his vision of the biosimilars market with a focus on China. He will also discuss key considerations for mAb and biologics therapeutic development, providing a broad overview of challenges and opportunities presenting in the market.

Sachin Dubey, Ph.D., Head of Formulation and Analytical Development at Glenmark Pharmaceuticals SA

TRANSFORMATIONAL SCIENCE: MOVING FROM CHALLENGES OF HIGH CONCENTRATION PROTEIN FORMULATIONS DEVELOPMENT TO MEET THE NEEDS OF HIGH POTENT BISPECIFICS
Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have significantly contributed in the treatment of oncological and immunological disorders over last two decades. Next advancement in this line is the introduction of bispecific antibodies – molecules which can bind to two different receptors at the same time. Engaging T-cells to target tumor cells and eventually killing tumor cells have been clinically demonstrated by such bispecific antibody. Traditionally one of the key challenge for developing mAbs is to administer high quantities of mAbs, on the other hand bispecific antibodies are extremely specific and more efficient, which makes them highly potent – leading to a reduced dose. This turns the focus from developing high concentration formulations for mAbs to the development of low concentration formulations. Scientific challenges are of very different nature with surface adsorption being the key challenge; during drug product manufacturing as well as during clinical dosing a protein molecules encounters various different surfaces and preventing/controlling adsorption on any of these surfaces is important. Analytical methods are also required to be adapted for reliable low concentration measurement for the drug product as well as the diluted preparation for infusion in clinic.

Sequence variants (SVs) are protein isoforms that contain one or more unintended amino acid substitutions. They can arise at a single amino acid site due to a genetic (RNA/DNA) mutation or at multiple amino acid locations, potentially due to translational errors, also referred to as misincorporations. The ability to detect SVs in protein biotherapeutics is critical due to their potential impact on structural/functional characteristics, safety and efficacy. Trypsin peptide mapping with liquid chromatography-ultrahigh resolution tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) provides the ideal workflow for the detection, identification, and relative quantitation of both genetic and translational SVs. LC-MS/MS complements next-generation sequencing (NGS) of product cDNA and amino acid analysis (AAA) of cell culture medium during clone selection and process optimization in providing sensitive, comprehensive screening to strategically prevent/minimize SVs and ensure high product quality.

The occurrence of genetic SVs was evaluated using Sanger sequencing and LC/MS. In this work, mAbs with known high and low-level genetic SVs were studied at various cell culture conditions including scale, process and cell age. While scale and process had no significant impact on genetic SV levels, low-level SVs were found to decrease with cell age whereas high level SVs remained constant.

Multiple cell culture process options and the final process conditions are analyzed via LC-MS/MS prior to lock-down of the manufacturing process. Additionally, the cell culture medium (days in culture) for all small scale, pilot and clinical batches are analyzed by AAA to ascertain amino acid nutrient levels, which provides indirect monitoring of possible misincorporation situations. For mAbs with confirmed misincorporations, AAA and LC-MS/MS-peptide mapping results primarily correlated with amino acid nutrient depletion.

Single Use technologies are more and more used close to final product leading to increase concern related to integrity. In this article we would like to share supportive data affecting integrity. Defect mode analysis has allowed us to build a risk assessment and a strategy on integrity. This strategy is very important for critical applications when single use are used after last sterile filtration or in process no sterile filtration is possible.
Several case studies supporting our approach will be shared showing the importance of addressing integrity in the context of use and taking all technical aspect into consideration. Finally, we will also present data analyzing the effect of such a strategy on lowering defect occurrence .

Coordinating PAT between development and manufacturing organizations is always challenging. When there are multiple development sites and numerous manufacturing sites, this becomes especially challenging. In order to help manage this in an efficient manner, we have established a PAT SME network with representation from the Manufacturing and the Development organizations. I will briefly introduce how this team facilitates PAT activities and attempts to add value to both organizations.

A systematic scale-up strategy is critical in enabling a rapid and robust technical transfer. For a program involving a CHO cell culture process, a combination of mass-transfer (kLa) studies, computational simulation and scale-down model experiments were used within this newly developed work-flow. Utilizing this approach, scale-up was successfully accelerated (

Risk Based Approaches To Use Of Closed Systems In Renovations Of Existing Biopharma API Facilities

Companies often experience regulatory challenges during inspection of aging facilities, requiring them to initiate projects to optimize product protection and updating to current standards for classified areas for biopharma manufacturing. For a long time the company response have been to improve the existing classified areas or maybe even upgrading to a higher grade of classification. However, it may be more appropriate, and improve product protection, to instead implement the use of closed system processes and downgrade room classification during these facility renovation projects. If closed systems are fully utilised, then a CNC space can be used. As well as reducing complexity of operations, this will reduce capital and operating costs.
This presentation elaborates the work of BPOG members to harmonize the use of closed systems and define risk based tools and approaches to evaluate appropriate room classification across the Biopharmaceutical industry.

The ever diversifying therapeutic modalities drive for modular and flexible bio-manufacturing, which transformed biologics process from traditional Fed-batch to Single Use BioReactor (SUB), then to Continuous Manufacturing (CM). Process Analytics evolve as critical enabling element of the CM process. It allows to move the release testing from the end of process to real time in the process, which not only eliminates weeks of material disposition delay, but also provides the process scientists product quality insight during the run to make process decisions. However, due to the structural complexity of the bio-molecules, spectroscopic sensors or probes nowadays lack the sensitivity and specificity to illustrate the product quality attributes (PQA) such as protein post translational modifications (PTM). We report here for the first time, we leverage a multi-functional automation system to directly take samples from the different stage of bio-process, purify, denature, derivatize and digest the samples before injecting onto the UHPLC and UHPLC/MS systems, one for online intact protein analysis, the other for Multiple Attribute Method (MAM) analysis for critical PTM PQAs. Benefiting from the high resolution chromatography and mass spectrometry, automated real time bio-molecule product quality monitoring is achieved for both SUB and CM process.

Dr. Gang Xue is a Scientific Director at Amgen Inc. located in Cambridge, MA. With B.S. degree in Chemistry and B.E. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University and Ph.D in Analytical Chemistry from the Iowa State University, Gang is currently leading the Process Analytics group within Amgen Process Development organization. One of his group’s focuses is the cross modality PAT strategy for the biologics and synthetic continous manufacturing with the goal of process control and real time release testing

Lawrence De Belder, Senior Principal Engineer at Johnson and Johnson and Richard Steiner, Business Development Manager at GEA

Continuous manufacturing for Oral Solid Dose drug products has the potential to generate benefits in many different areas of the product life cycle. It will help to improve control and understanding, increase development and transfer speed, assure shorter cycle times, and reduce development, transfer and operational cost.

If we look at the products which have been approved for commercial production, we see differences in technology, approach, and business case drivers. The main interest is coming from larger pharmaceutical companies, but also generic companies and CMO’s start to invest or have intentions to do so.

Before implementing a continuous manufacturing process, a number of strategic choices have to be made: start off immediately with new products or learn by converting a legacy batch product into a continuous process without the critical deadline of a launch on your path. A clear development and deployment strategy will help to guide for important choices early on.

This webinar will give an overview of the different elements that can drive the business case of a continuous manufacturing project, and which strategies could be used to deploy this wonderful technology throughout an organization.

EFFECT OF CELL CULTURE PROCESS CHANGE FROM FED-BATCH TO CONTINUOUS ON PRODUCTIVITY AND PRODUCT QUALITY

Integrated continuous bioprocessing has attracted a growing interest due to its potential to improve agility and flexibility in the manufacture of therapeutic proteins. To convert an existing fed-batch cell culture process to continuous, or perfusion, the major technical hurdles include maintaining steady state cell culture performance and generating product with comparable product quality attributes. In this presentation, we evaluated three molecules including a fusion protein, an aglycosylated monoclonal antibody (mAb), and a glycosylated mAb. Steady state culture at high cell density was achieved for all three molecules, which allows the delivery of products with consistent product quality and adequate productivity. However, as compared to fed-batch processes, product quality and cell specific productivity differences were observed in perfusion cultures. Further studies indicated that it was feasible to modulate product quality in perfusion process by adding process levers in culture medium. It was also feasible to increase cell specific productivity through medium and process optimization. This presentation provides an insight into the product quality and productivity differences between traditional fed-batch and perfusion cell culture processes and potential approaches to addressing these differences.

Spray drying is a continuous and scalable manufacturing process commonly used in the pharmaceutical industry. Due to its scalable and continuous nature it is possible to apply Quality-by-Design (QbD) and Process Analytical Technologies (PAT) early on in the development of a spray drying process.
Knowledge gained from QbD e.g. Design-of-Experiments (DoE) and PAT increases process understanding and the knowledge can be readily applied when scaling up the process and in production scale application of PAT i.e. especially with respect to the control strategy.
The Webinar will discuss the application of QbD early in the development and how the obtained knowledge can be used to optimize transfer of the spray drying process to production scale including PAT strategy.

Dissolution is one of the critical quality attributes for solid oral dosage forms, typically tablets and capsules. In addition as a quality control (QC) test to release commercial products, dissolution is often used as a comparative test to 1) apply biowaiver for lower strength(s) when multiple strengths of one product with the same or similar formulation are marketed, or 2) support post approval changes. In these cases, in-vitro dissolution test is used in place of in-vivo bioequivalence study to establish equivalency between products of different strengths or pre- and post-change. Guidances provided by major regulatory agencies, the United States Food & Drug Administration (US FDA) and European Medicines Evaluation Agency (EU EMEA) are often followed by many countries around the world. However some countries/ regions, such as Australia, Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea have their own country specific guidances. The dissolution requirements by the FDA and EMEA are generally similar, and depend on the type and level of changes as outlined in the relevant guidances. The requirements from other mentioned countries are often significantly different from that of US and EU, and different from each other. For products marketed globally, it’s prudent to understand the differences amongst the different country requirements when applying post approval changes using dissolution to demonstrate equivalency. Several sets of comparative dissolution studies may have to be conducted in order to satisfy all regulatory agencies. This presentation compares differences in dissolution testing requirements among the listed countries and provide examples to illustrate how for conduct studies to comply with the relevant guidance(s).

Downstream processing of Biosimilar Monoclonal Antibody utilises variety of raw materials that a critical for achieving the desired product quality. In this webinar, we would like to discuss the data from three cases of lot to lot variability namely Depth filtration, Chromatographic resin and buffer component used in downstream chromatography unit operations. Changes in lots of depth filter resulted in significant clogging and differences in Host cell impurity clearance. Similarly, changes in resin lots resulted in increased back pressure during processing and variability in buffer raw material lots resulted in undesirable colouring of resin upon contact. In each case, we will present the root cause investigation, impact on product quality profile and associated CAPAs to control the effects of variability to ensure manufacturing continuity.

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